The Adam Levine saga shows how important TikTok has become to celebrity news
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Analysis
This week, it was hard not to come across one of Adam Levine’s alleged DMs with women who are not his wife. The messages became memes and inspired multiple parodies. “I’d do anything for it” and “that body of yours is absurd” were two lines in particular that were heavily shared and quoted on Twitter, along with the standout quote, “I may need to see the booty.”
But while some people compared Levine’s texting style to that of a teenage boy, others made the point that there’s no way anyone’s flirty texts would read as anything but embarrassing if they were released to the public.
“There is no way to sext without sounding cringe,” one person tweeted. “Lets not kid ourselves.”
The debate over whether Levine’s lines were cringe or normal wasn’t the only one related to the allegations of him having an affair. There was also discourse about whether or not it was fair to blame the women who were coming forward. “If you’re the one in a relationship, you’re the one who’s obligated to be loyal,” model Emily Ratajkowski said in a TikTok video this week, calling it “classic misogyny” to blame the women involved for talking to a married man.
In case you haven’t been following the lead singer of Maroon 5’s personal life since the early 2000s, when the band put out songs such as “This Love” and “She Will Be Loved,” the 43-year-old is currently married to model Behati Prinsloo, who is pregnant with their third child. On Monday, model Sumner Stroh claimed to have had a one-year-long affair with Levine, and she said that she was only coming forward after a friend was talking about selling the story to tabloids. The kicker: Levine reportedly reached out to Stroh about naming his next child Sumner.
Since Monday, other women have come forward with DMs they say Levine sent them. And that’s when the memes exploded.
Why it matters
Since TikTok became a popular medium for talking about entertainment and celebrity news, the app has changed the culture of gossip. The John Mulaney-Olivia Munn pregnancy rumors first took off on TikTok. TikTok users regularly talk about stories involving their encounters with celebrities. It’s now a forum for revealing dirt about a famous person.
If this story didn’t originate on TikTok, it seems unlikely that it would have made so many headlines. Adam Levine’s hit his career peak a while ago, and, as Stroh put it: “Maroon 5 is practically elevator music at this point.”
Ironically, Levine played the part of a famous musician who cheats on his partner in the 2013 film Begin Again with Keira Knightley. Clips of the scene when Knightley’s character finds out he was cheating became additional meme fodder.
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